Overdeliver

If you’ve been in your job for any meaningful length of time, you and your bosses/clients have settled into an unspoken rhythm.

You have a general feel for what they expect, and they kind of get what’s reasonable for you to deliver.

And starting today you can knock them out of that rhythm with shock and awe 😊.

Many PR pros view the adoption of AI tools as a threat to their jobs. Their thinking revolves around the way human creativity can never be replaced by a machine.

There’s definitely merit to that line of reasoning, but it’s premature. We’re not yet facing bosses who are looking for a reason to replace us.

Instead of digging into figurative defensive positions, just start overdelivering now and then.

Two examples:

1. One member of my Inner Circle supports an executive who is really good at extemporaneous video. Their regular rhythm is they discuss topics and then at his convenience he whips out his phone, muses about something valuable to his customers, and then she distributes the video.But recently, she decided to experiment with ChatGPT. In a few minutes, she had an outline of a video with concrete facts and data (that she double-checked online). She delighted her exec with a deliverable he wasn’t expecting, and she still left the office in time to go sailing.
2. Another Inner Circle member writes a lot of news releases. For each release, her CEO expects her to draft a quote for him, which he is then free to tweak. Well, in June she started submitting three quotes with each release, so he could choose the one he liked best.She told me she still writes the first one from scratch, and then just feeds it into ChatGPT and asks for more like this.

These two examples are super-easy, super-simple ways to familiarize yourself with AI’s capabilities. And down the road, when a boss comes with questions about some WSJ article he’s been reading about how AI improves productivity X%, you’ll be able to smile and say, “Remember about six months ago when I started [insert your overdelivery here]?”

P.S. Although I often use ChatGPT for writing first drafts and also for copyediting, I didn’t this time. I wasn’t sure enough about the direction this newsletter would take until I got way into the meat of it. And by then, I was almost done. Not to say I won’t use it for the next one 😊.